808 State Announce First New Album in 17 Years

This morning dance music pioneers 808 State announced Transmission Suite, their forthcoming album and the duo’s first LP in 17 years.

Transmission Suite is “named after the defunct control room at Manchester’s Old Granada TV studios,” 808 State announced in a tweet – the seminal broadcaster where Factory Records’ Tony Wilson worked and which served as a catalyst for Manchester’s burgeoning music scene in the late 1970s.

In the studio where we housed our vintage synth collection we built up a catalog of new music worthy of sitting alongside our 30 year old discography.

The album was recorded in Granada’s former home. “The space the band used to record hadn’t been cleared out for what seemed like decades and was full of now defunct technology: a teleprinter, teletext stuff, boxes of floppy discs,” a statement announcing the album reads.

Outpost Transmission, the last original material from the band, came out in 2002. 808 State music has appeared since then in the form of remixes and the occasional edit and the band have continued to play live, but it wasn’t until last year that Graham Massey and Andrew Barker decided to reconvene with a view to working on a significant new tranche of material. “We’re trying to make a future for other people to immerse themselves in” says Graham of the new material. “It feels a bit like an imaginary landscape. That’s always been a big part of 808 State, when you go back through the music: these kind of landscapes of futurism.”

The video above is from the lead track on Transmission Suite, “Tokyo Tokyo,” directed by Michael England. The original mix appeared on the Initial Granada Report EP, released on July 12.

Transmission Suite will be out on October 11; pre-order here. The full tracklisting for the new 808 State album:

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